Archaeology has never been more popular. Ticket sales for the British Museum's terracotta army exhibition have smashed box-office records, while the treasures of Tutankhamun's tomb are drawing capacity crowds to the O2 in Greenwich.
Our growing fascination with ancient civilisations is sending television producers scrabbling around for ever-more novel formats.
Stalwarts such as Channel 4's Time Team have been joined by experimental documentary strands in the vein of Extreme Archaeology, lavish dramatisations such as Rome, and a new breed of special effects-laden docudramas drawing on the latest research, best represented by BBC1's Pompeii: The Last Day.
There is a dedicated archaeology channel available online, and in the cinema even Indiana Jones is dusting off his whip for another outing.
This explosion of interest in the material culture of past societies - and the scientific techniques used to make sense of it - has not been lost on major museums.
Next month, the British Museum is hosting Archaeology 2008, a two-day conference aimed at practitioners and the general public. The event is co-organised by Current Archaeology, Britain's widest-read magazine devoted to the subject, which recently celebrated its 40th birthday by switching from a bi-monthly to a monthly schedule.
Alongside academic topics, such as radiocarbon dating, talks will range from archaeology and the media to the archaeological study of modern cities. Speakers will include Mark Horton, a presenter on BBC2's Coast.
Archaeologists: a vanishing species
But while the public's appetite for archaeology (and, thanks to recent changes in planning laws, the amount of archaeological activity taking place) has never been greater, the positive effects of this are not obvious in some parts of the museum sector.
Internal restructuring and the culture shift of the past decade has led to declining numbers of museum archaeologists, a downgrading of archaeological displays, shrinking acquisition budgets, and a looming crisis in the capacity of field units to keep storing their burgeoning collections of finds in the absence of anywhere to offload them.
"There's been a progressive decline in the number of practitioners working in museums," explains Philip Wise, the chairman of the Society of Museum Archaeologists.
"We've seen a growing trend for posts being lost. Alternatively, we see archaeologists retire or move into management and they're not replaced. Museum archaeology is being squeezed, and this poses difficulties for some museums. They have important collections, but nobody to research or make them available to the public."
On paper the fall in the number of museum archaeologists isn't so dramatic. During a period when belt-tightening has been acute across the sector, it's perhaps not surprising to see an 8 per cent drop (from 250 to 230) since 2000.
But closer analysis underlines the true scale of the problem: while many museums retain archaeologists on their payrolls, a growing number are promoting them into generalist managerial posts that remove them from hands-on involvement in collections.
Creeping demoralisation is filtering down to universities. Despite the public's enthusiasm for archaeology, figures from UCAS, which manages applications to higher education courses in the UK, show the number of applicants to archaeology undergraduate courses fell 10 per cent between 2006/07 and 2007/08.
But what impact is the growing shortage of museum archaeologists actually having on the ground? The single most pressing issue is the difficulty smaller museums, devoid of dedicated subject specialists, face in trying to keep pace with the growing expectations of visitors.
This goes beyond devising fancy interactive displays: many museums now lack the money to acquire new artefacts and the expertise needed to raise those funds, or to spot items worth obtaining in the first place.
"The money is there, in the form of grants from bodies like the Headley Trust and the Art Fund," says Roger Bland, the founder of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales.
"The problem is one of museum capacity and whether they have staff with the expertise to go out and solicit funds."
Since its launch in 1997, the PAS has sought to bolster museum archaeology, training 40 new finds liaison officers and recording 300,000-plus artefacts.
Most of these might never have been found, let alone declared, were it not for the introduction of a financial incentive to reward private salvers for offering them to museums.
Which would be fine except that, due to depleting funds and the loss of in-house "finds-spotters", comparatively few of the objects have ended up in museums.
In 2004 (the last year to date for which figures have been compiled), fewer than half those recorded - 231 out of 506 - were acquired by the sector.
Even the PAS is under financial pressure itself now its money from the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) is no longer ring-fenced under new funding arrangements (Museums Journal December 2007, p4).
Museums that have recently replaced specialist archaeologists with generalists include Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes, whose curator has just retired. His successor will occupy the wider ranging role of director, a position described as "more managerial".
While Devizes retains several staff members with archaeological backgrounds, others are less fortunate. Even at Lincoln, whose art gallery and museum, the Collection, has won plaudits for its displays, the number of trained archaeologists has dropped from three to two in five years.
Collections officer Antony Lee explains: "It's partly a question of different roles coming in, with staff being taken on with other hats, and also to do with our becoming less a straight museum service and more a general cultural service. It always seems to be assumed that anyone can look after specialist collections, but they can't."
The weight of material
Despite such difficulties, a number of regional museums continue to innovate. Lincoln has several inexpensive yet effective "lo-tech" interactive elements, including replica Roman armour for visitors to wear and a tree trunk with mirrors in which they can see themselves reflected in full war-paint.
At DIG in York (formerly called the Archaeological Resource Centre until it reopened last year), visitors participate in mock excavations, sifting through soil to reveal a replica of a priest's skeleton unearthed at nearby Fishergate Priory, as well as genuine small finds from the original dig.
And Scotland has seen lots of good practice - from the colour-coded displays in Glasgow's restored Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum to the £12m conversion of a warehouse and boatshed that has enabled Shetland Museum and Archives to haul out an array of never-before-shown items, including a six-oar 19th-century rowing boat modelled on a Viking long-ship.
Meanwhile, the newly reopened Origins archaeology gallery at Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales, Cardiff, is using art, music and photography to relate early societies to contemporary culture.
Highlights include painter Mary Lloyd Jones's interpretation of Neolithic rock art and medieval inscribed stones, and Sean Harris's animation of Bronze and Iron Age artefacts.
But such imaginative approaches are not replicated everywhere. In some museums the absence of in-house experts to fight the corner for archaeology has seen displays stagnate - leaving uninspiring serried rows of obscurely labelled stones and bones on the one hand and cheap "interactives" with scant interpretation on the other. One critic of these weaker displays is Time Team presenter Tony Robinson.
"Too many archaeological finds are presented flatly, rather than in 3D," Robinson says. "I've often been in museums where sculptures are paraded against the side walls, but you want to walk around any decent sculptures.
"We need to get the labelling right, too," he continues. "It would be wonderful for someone to highlight the inexplicable labelling in some museums: nobody I know outside archaeological circles even cares about a linear feature!"
The decline of museum archaeology is having a significant knock-on effect across the archaeological sector. When, in 1990, the then Conservative government introduced planning policy guidance 16 (PPG16), archaeologists were delighted.
For the first time, developers were ordered to finance the excavation and recording of any and all archaeology encountered during their work.
But to many, PPG16 has become a Pandora's box - loading up under-resourced field units with mountains of material they have neither the time nor space to look after. Some counties, such as Suffolk, have a 30-year backlog of excavations to be catalogued.
Keith Swainson, administrator for Trent and Peak Archaeology, a unit based at Nottingham University, and one of the lucky ones in light of a recent pledge by Nottinghamshire County Council to archive its finds, says: "Museums all have their own idea of what's worth acquiring from us, so we end up with tonnes of stuff and there's only so much space."
So what's the solution? According to Hedley Swain, an archaeologist who is now the head of museum policy at the MLA, it's twofold: smaller museums must forge partnerships with bigger ones, using shared expertise to identify and target suitable finds to add to their collections, and archaeologists in the field must be more selective about what they dig up.
"The present system is unsustainable," Swain argues. "Huge amounts of stuff is coming out of the ground, but museums not only don't have the capacity to acquire it - we've not even asked ourselves why we're trying to keep it all in the first place.
"Collecting assemblages from important sites is one thing, but do we need more boxes of medieval pot shards? Continuing to collect all the tat coming out of developer-funded archaeology has got to stop."
James Morrison is a freelance journalist.
Archaeology 2008 will be held at the British Museum on 9-10 February. For more details visit www.archaeology.co.uk
PAS finds highlights
1. Hambleden assemblage
Michael Hyman has discovered hundreds of prehistoric, Roman and medieval objects near Hambleden in Buckinghamshire, including this Iron Age torc terminal. His finds, which also include coins and jewellery, are giving a huge amount of information about rural life in Britain throughout the ages.
2. Christ figurine
A gilded copper-alloy Romanesque figurine that represents the crucified Christ and was probably attached to a wooden crucifix. It features an intricately detailed head, body and loincloth and is likely to be from the 12th century. Adina Parnell found it near Newton Abbott in Devon.
3. Seal matrix
This complete silver seal matrix dates from the 13th-14th century and features an inscription that translates as "Seal of Walter of Longdown".
The Roman goddess Victory has been cut into the area enclosed by the writing. The seal was found by Peter Jones, and has been bought by the heritage service on the Isle of Wight, where it was discovered. It is now on display in the Museum of Island History.
4. Iron-age comb
The only copper alloy comb ever found in the UK. It was discovered by Russell Peach in Tanworth-in-Arden, Warwickshire. It was probably put there between 25 and 75 AD and although its precise use is not clear, its wide teeth suggest it could have been used to comb horses' tails and manes. It is hoped Warwick Museum will acquire the piece.
5. Roman horse and rider
This copper-alloy horse and rider figurine is extremely well-preserved and dates from the 3rd-4th century. Such figurines of mounted and armoured men representing rider gods have been dug up elsewhere in the UK.
This example, found by Duncan Pangborn in Cambridgeshire, is the most artistically distinctive and accomplished unearthed so far.
The items above are among the 58,290 artefacts that were recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme in 2006. More than three-quarters of these were discovered by metal detectorists, the rest by chance.
UK archaeology
1. Colchester Castle Museum
Colchester was once the capital of Roman Britain and has an archaeology collection befitting its importance. The items from late Iron Age and Roman Britain reflect its role at the start of Britain's recorded history.
2. Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service
This service comprises 12 museums, two collections study centres and countywide services relating to archaeology and education. Its archaeology collections features about 2.75 million items built up since 1825.
3. Museum of London
One of the UK's key archaeological centres. The museum has a wide range of resources, including an archaeology service that employs more than 100 professional archaeologists.
The museum's archaeological artefacts are divided into those from 500,000 BC to AD 1700, overseen by the department of early London history, while the later London history department oversees more recent material.
An archive and research centre holds information on more than 5,000 sites or projects that have taken place in London during the past 100 years.
4. Museum of Archaeology, Southampton
The museum is housed in God's House Tower, which stands at the south-east corner of the town walls that had once encircled medieval Southampton.
The collection features artefacts from prehistoric, Roman, Saxon and medieval Southampton. The medieval collection is of international importance and has designated status.
5. The Collection, Lincoln
The archaeological collection covers 300,000 years of history from the earliest inhabitants of Lincolnshire to the 18th century. Highlights from the collections include prehistoric finds from the River Witham.
6. National Museum of Scotland
National Museums Scotland's archaeological collections cover Scottish material culture from the earliest times to AD1100. The Early People Gallery in the National Museum of Scotland follows the beginning of man's 10,000 years of living in Scotland through more than 5,000 exhibits ranging from Pictish stones to Roman parade helmets. The introduction to the gallery features figures designed and cast by Eduardo Paolozzi.
Other significant collections of British archaeology are held at the Dorset County Museum, Salisbury and South Museum, Museum of Reading, the British Museum, the Corinium Museum in Cirencester and Oxford's Ashmolean Museum
Our growing fascination with ancient civilisations is sending television producers scrabbling around for ever-more novel formats.
Stalwarts such as Channel 4's Time Team have been joined by experimental documentary strands in the vein of Extreme Archaeology, lavish dramatisations such as Rome, and a new breed of special effects-laden docudramas drawing on the latest research, best represented by BBC1's Pompeii: The Last Day.
There is a dedicated archaeology channel available online, and in the cinema even Indiana Jones is dusting off his whip for another outing.
This explosion of interest in the material culture of past societies - and the scientific techniques used to make sense of it - has not been lost on major museums.
Next month, the British Museum is hosting Archaeology 2008, a two-day conference aimed at practitioners and the general public. The event is co-organised by Current Archaeology, Britain's widest-read magazine devoted to the subject, which recently celebrated its 40th birthday by switching from a bi-monthly to a monthly schedule.
Alongside academic topics, such as radiocarbon dating, talks will range from archaeology and the media to the archaeological study of modern cities. Speakers will include Mark Horton, a presenter on BBC2's Coast.
Archaeologists: a vanishing species
But while the public's appetite for archaeology (and, thanks to recent changes in planning laws, the amount of archaeological activity taking place) has never been greater, the positive effects of this are not obvious in some parts of the museum sector.
Internal restructuring and the culture shift of the past decade has led to declining numbers of museum archaeologists, a downgrading of archaeological displays, shrinking acquisition budgets, and a looming crisis in the capacity of field units to keep storing their burgeoning collections of finds in the absence of anywhere to offload them.
"There's been a progressive decline in the number of practitioners working in museums," explains Philip Wise, the chairman of the Society of Museum Archaeologists.
"We've seen a growing trend for posts being lost. Alternatively, we see archaeologists retire or move into management and they're not replaced. Museum archaeology is being squeezed, and this poses difficulties for some museums. They have important collections, but nobody to research or make them available to the public."
On paper the fall in the number of museum archaeologists isn't so dramatic. During a period when belt-tightening has been acute across the sector, it's perhaps not surprising to see an 8 per cent drop (from 250 to 230) since 2000.
But closer analysis underlines the true scale of the problem: while many museums retain archaeologists on their payrolls, a growing number are promoting them into generalist managerial posts that remove them from hands-on involvement in collections.
Creeping demoralisation is filtering down to universities. Despite the public's enthusiasm for archaeology, figures from UCAS, which manages applications to higher education courses in the UK, show the number of applicants to archaeology undergraduate courses fell 10 per cent between 2006/07 and 2007/08.
But what impact is the growing shortage of museum archaeologists actually having on the ground? The single most pressing issue is the difficulty smaller museums, devoid of dedicated subject specialists, face in trying to keep pace with the growing expectations of visitors.
This goes beyond devising fancy interactive displays: many museums now lack the money to acquire new artefacts and the expertise needed to raise those funds, or to spot items worth obtaining in the first place.
"The money is there, in the form of grants from bodies like the Headley Trust and the Art Fund," says Roger Bland, the founder of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales.
"The problem is one of museum capacity and whether they have staff with the expertise to go out and solicit funds."
Since its launch in 1997, the PAS has sought to bolster museum archaeology, training 40 new finds liaison officers and recording 300,000-plus artefacts.
Most of these might never have been found, let alone declared, were it not for the introduction of a financial incentive to reward private salvers for offering them to museums.
Which would be fine except that, due to depleting funds and the loss of in-house "finds-spotters", comparatively few of the objects have ended up in museums.
In 2004 (the last year to date for which figures have been compiled), fewer than half those recorded - 231 out of 506 - were acquired by the sector.
Even the PAS is under financial pressure itself now its money from the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) is no longer ring-fenced under new funding arrangements (Museums Journal December 2007, p4).
Museums that have recently replaced specialist archaeologists with generalists include Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes, whose curator has just retired. His successor will occupy the wider ranging role of director, a position described as "more managerial".
While Devizes retains several staff members with archaeological backgrounds, others are less fortunate. Even at Lincoln, whose art gallery and museum, the Collection, has won plaudits for its displays, the number of trained archaeologists has dropped from three to two in five years.
Collections officer Antony Lee explains: "It's partly a question of different roles coming in, with staff being taken on with other hats, and also to do with our becoming less a straight museum service and more a general cultural service. It always seems to be assumed that anyone can look after specialist collections, but they can't."
The weight of material
Despite such difficulties, a number of regional museums continue to innovate. Lincoln has several inexpensive yet effective "lo-tech" interactive elements, including replica Roman armour for visitors to wear and a tree trunk with mirrors in which they can see themselves reflected in full war-paint.
At DIG in York (formerly called the Archaeological Resource Centre until it reopened last year), visitors participate in mock excavations, sifting through soil to reveal a replica of a priest's skeleton unearthed at nearby Fishergate Priory, as well as genuine small finds from the original dig.
And Scotland has seen lots of good practice - from the colour-coded displays in Glasgow's restored Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum to the £12m conversion of a warehouse and boatshed that has enabled Shetland Museum and Archives to haul out an array of never-before-shown items, including a six-oar 19th-century rowing boat modelled on a Viking long-ship.
Meanwhile, the newly reopened Origins archaeology gallery at Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales, Cardiff, is using art, music and photography to relate early societies to contemporary culture.
Highlights include painter Mary Lloyd Jones's interpretation of Neolithic rock art and medieval inscribed stones, and Sean Harris's animation of Bronze and Iron Age artefacts.
But such imaginative approaches are not replicated everywhere. In some museums the absence of in-house experts to fight the corner for archaeology has seen displays stagnate - leaving uninspiring serried rows of obscurely labelled stones and bones on the one hand and cheap "interactives" with scant interpretation on the other. One critic of these weaker displays is Time Team presenter Tony Robinson.
"Too many archaeological finds are presented flatly, rather than in 3D," Robinson says. "I've often been in museums where sculptures are paraded against the side walls, but you want to walk around any decent sculptures.
"We need to get the labelling right, too," he continues. "It would be wonderful for someone to highlight the inexplicable labelling in some museums: nobody I know outside archaeological circles even cares about a linear feature!"
The decline of museum archaeology is having a significant knock-on effect across the archaeological sector. When, in 1990, the then Conservative government introduced planning policy guidance 16 (PPG16), archaeologists were delighted.
For the first time, developers were ordered to finance the excavation and recording of any and all archaeology encountered during their work.
But to many, PPG16 has become a Pandora's box - loading up under-resourced field units with mountains of material they have neither the time nor space to look after. Some counties, such as Suffolk, have a 30-year backlog of excavations to be catalogued.
Keith Swainson, administrator for Trent and Peak Archaeology, a unit based at Nottingham University, and one of the lucky ones in light of a recent pledge by Nottinghamshire County Council to archive its finds, says: "Museums all have their own idea of what's worth acquiring from us, so we end up with tonnes of stuff and there's only so much space."
So what's the solution? According to Hedley Swain, an archaeologist who is now the head of museum policy at the MLA, it's twofold: smaller museums must forge partnerships with bigger ones, using shared expertise to identify and target suitable finds to add to their collections, and archaeologists in the field must be more selective about what they dig up.
"The present system is unsustainable," Swain argues. "Huge amounts of stuff is coming out of the ground, but museums not only don't have the capacity to acquire it - we've not even asked ourselves why we're trying to keep it all in the first place.
"Collecting assemblages from important sites is one thing, but do we need more boxes of medieval pot shards? Continuing to collect all the tat coming out of developer-funded archaeology has got to stop."
James Morrison is a freelance journalist.
Archaeology 2008 will be held at the British Museum on 9-10 February. For more details visit www.archaeology.co.uk
PAS finds highlights
1. Hambleden assemblage
Michael Hyman has discovered hundreds of prehistoric, Roman and medieval objects near Hambleden in Buckinghamshire, including this Iron Age torc terminal. His finds, which also include coins and jewellery, are giving a huge amount of information about rural life in Britain throughout the ages.
2. Christ figurine
A gilded copper-alloy Romanesque figurine that represents the crucified Christ and was probably attached to a wooden crucifix. It features an intricately detailed head, body and loincloth and is likely to be from the 12th century. Adina Parnell found it near Newton Abbott in Devon.
3. Seal matrix
This complete silver seal matrix dates from the 13th-14th century and features an inscription that translates as "Seal of Walter of Longdown".
The Roman goddess Victory has been cut into the area enclosed by the writing. The seal was found by Peter Jones, and has been bought by the heritage service on the Isle of Wight, where it was discovered. It is now on display in the Museum of Island History.
4. Iron-age comb
The only copper alloy comb ever found in the UK. It was discovered by Russell Peach in Tanworth-in-Arden, Warwickshire. It was probably put there between 25 and 75 AD and although its precise use is not clear, its wide teeth suggest it could have been used to comb horses' tails and manes. It is hoped Warwick Museum will acquire the piece.
5. Roman horse and rider
This copper-alloy horse and rider figurine is extremely well-preserved and dates from the 3rd-4th century. Such figurines of mounted and armoured men representing rider gods have been dug up elsewhere in the UK.
This example, found by Duncan Pangborn in Cambridgeshire, is the most artistically distinctive and accomplished unearthed so far.
The items above are among the 58,290 artefacts that were recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme in 2006. More than three-quarters of these were discovered by metal detectorists, the rest by chance.
UK archaeology
1. Colchester Castle Museum
Colchester was once the capital of Roman Britain and has an archaeology collection befitting its importance. The items from late Iron Age and Roman Britain reflect its role at the start of Britain's recorded history.
2. Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service
This service comprises 12 museums, two collections study centres and countywide services relating to archaeology and education. Its archaeology collections features about 2.75 million items built up since 1825.
3. Museum of London
One of the UK's key archaeological centres. The museum has a wide range of resources, including an archaeology service that employs more than 100 professional archaeologists.
The museum's archaeological artefacts are divided into those from 500,000 BC to AD 1700, overseen by the department of early London history, while the later London history department oversees more recent material.
An archive and research centre holds information on more than 5,000 sites or projects that have taken place in London during the past 100 years.
4. Museum of Archaeology, Southampton
The museum is housed in God's House Tower, which stands at the south-east corner of the town walls that had once encircled medieval Southampton.
The collection features artefacts from prehistoric, Roman, Saxon and medieval Southampton. The medieval collection is of international importance and has designated status.
5. The Collection, Lincoln
The archaeological collection covers 300,000 years of history from the earliest inhabitants of Lincolnshire to the 18th century. Highlights from the collections include prehistoric finds from the River Witham.
6. National Museum of Scotland
National Museums Scotland's archaeological collections cover Scottish material culture from the earliest times to AD1100. The Early People Gallery in the National Museum of Scotland follows the beginning of man's 10,000 years of living in Scotland through more than 5,000 exhibits ranging from Pictish stones to Roman parade helmets. The introduction to the gallery features figures designed and cast by Eduardo Paolozzi.
Other significant collections of British archaeology are held at the Dorset County Museum, Salisbury and South Museum, Museum of Reading, the British Museum, the Corinium Museum in Cirencester and Oxford's Ashmolean Museum
